Thursday, January 3, 2008

My New Crack!

Geocaching is quickly becoming a second addiction with letterboxing. What's nice is that there are a bagillion more caches than there are letterboxes. Although, I have to admit it's much trickier than letterboxing, and you don't get any cool stamps to log. The first day we went out was pretty difficult. Many caches are micros. Could be anything from small metal bison tubes to 35mm film canister. Of course all the ones that are super close to our house are of the micro type. We found the first one right away which gave us a false sense of "WeCanDoThis!" We couldn't find any of the rest after that! We had to go home and download new coordinates for slightly larger caches located in Lake Park. Of the 4 sets of coords, we found 3. Not bad. This was Monday.

Yesterday, Ant and I went out. He was quite a trooper considering the cold weather. We hiked down the Upper Tampa Bay Trail to our first locale which was a bust. Moved to the second one which we must have been on top of but still couldn't find. Backtracked for a 3rd which was really off the trail. We got to a point in the woods where we'd have to cross a wooden plank over the creek. Ant didn't like this too much, so we decided to nix it. We went box to spot #1 where a little more thinking put us in the tree we started but in the right place and VOILA! we got one. We found one more on the trail that day. Then we headed behind a local gas station. We were trying to be stealth and inconspicuous as a pizza delivery boy was getting in his car. He has obviously seen other cachers because he told us we were warm and needed to look down! Great hint! We found another. We went to 4 more locations~ only finding 2 caches. But we did pick up another geo-coing along the way.

Surprisingly, Ant asked me if it was too cold to go geocaching today! I asked if he really wanted to and he said yeah! So, off we went. We found 3 (all of which were really easy!) but we had been out searching for 5 others as well :o( At one spot, I think we were on the wrong side of the fence (i'm gonna try again tomorrow). Another one was in the woods behind a strip plaza. It was laden with trash and I had busted my ass back there at one point. I felt nervous having Ant back there so we left. One was at a Walgreens and I'm sure we were in the right spot, but couldn't find it. Didn't help that someone parked and sat in their car right next to us. We headed for a cache next to Sonny's, where unfortunately, 2 police cars were parked nearby~ not getting in trouble with the law while hanging out with my 7yo!

When Randy got home, we headed out and found 5 more (not the 5 we were looking for earlier). 8 for the day! not bad!

Tomorrow I'm going out to hit the trail again. There are 9 at various points on the trail. I figure it'll be a good way to get some fresh air and exercise. If I get an early enough start, I can also try some of the places we missed in the past couple days. Some of which we were so close to it pisses me off!